The modern computing era has brought about a rapid expansion in computing power, resulting in development of affordable and powerful computing devices. Usage of modern computing devices has become nearly ubiquitous among consumers across the spectrum of socioeconomic backgrounds. These modern computing devices may be capable of performing a variety of image-based services, including, for example, include augmented reality applications, point of interest navigation services, and/or other applications in which images of a user's surroundings may be captured and augmented with additional contextual information that may be derived by processing the images. As a further example, three-dimensional mapping technology may use captured real-world images to produce three-dimensional maps including three-dimensional position information and content related to points of interest that may be derived from image context.
Such image-based services may rely on and/or be enhanced through the detection of text within captured real world images. In this regard, text recognized within a real world image may be used to facilitate point of interest recognition, provide audio read back of captured text, provide language translation services for foreign travelers, and/or the like. However, text detection within images continues to be problematic. In this regard, while text detection in images has been used within the document recognition domain, text detection in natural world images, such as outdoor scenes, has proved to be considerably more difficult, due to challenges arising due to the large variety of text fonts and styles, camera viewpoints, image contrasts, and other factors affecting the visibility of text within a captured natural world image. Further, whereas document text may be the primary focus within a captured image in the document recognition domain, the text footprint within a natural world image is typically a very small fraction of the image (often occupying hundreds of pixels in an image of several tens of megapixels).